Hattori diss. p. 280, N 1192

~2050 BCE·Ur III · Neo-Sumerian·P276343

About this tablet

This is a small, badly broken Ur III administrative tablet from Nippur, essentially a fragmentary list of personal names ending with the classifying term 'merchant' (dam-gar3). Such lists were common bureaucratic tools of the Ur III state — rosters of individuals grouped by occupation or obligation, likely used to track merchants involved in some transaction or account now lost to the break. Only a handful of names and name-fragments survive, so the specific purpose of the list cannot be recovered.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

What survives is the tail end of a list of people's names — a man named Lu-Enlila appears twice, another person's name ends in '-Suen,' and one man is identified as 'son of Ur-[...].' Most of the entries in between are too damaged to read. The list closes with the word 'merchant(s),' suggesting the whole roster was classifying these individuals under that occupation, but the context — what they owed, delivered, or were being counted for — is lost.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

[Lu]-Enlila [...]-...-ga [...]-daga [...]-Suen [...]-... [...]-... [...]-... Lu-[Enlila?] Da?-[...] son of Ur-[...] merchant(s)

Indicative reading — translated without a photograph. Generated from the transliteration alone, without examining the original. Read it as an accessible first taste, not as a verified catalogue entry.

Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.

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Transliteration

[lu2?]-en-lil2#-[la2?]
[...]-x-ga
[...]-da-ga
[...-]suen#
[...]-x
[...]-x
[...]-x
lu2-[en-lil2-la2?]
da?-[x]
dumu ur-[...]
dam-gar3

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Hattori diss. p. 280, N 1192. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).

Attribution

Image: N 1192 (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P276343). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).

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